“This book provides a welcome theological foundation and historical framework for church planting, as well as the missiological urgency. It makes a significant contribution both theoretically and practically. Murray’s insights and experience will energize church planting efforts across this continent.” — Eddie Gibbs, Donald A. McGavern Professor of Church Growth, School of World Mission, Fuller […]
With Natural Church Development, Christian Schwarz introduced a fascinating approach to church growth that really works and has been accepted all over the world. Now he shows how the biblically-based principles of Natural Church Development can also be a blessing for the spiritual development of the individual believer. Color Your World with NCD is a […]
This manual is a Presbytery handbook for creating new churches based on the priorities of planting more new churches, seeing more of our new congregations realize their goals and fufill their potential, and lowering the financial costs of starting new congregations.
From the Introduction: A new church begins with a dream. Whether it begins with a presbytery commission or a group of residents, somewhere the dream is born. As the dream matures and starts to take shape, a pastor is called and charged with the responsibility of developing a handful of people into that dream church. […]
From the Introduction: Growing Healthy Churches is the fifth volume in a continuing series produced by the Board of Pensions. Like its predecessor volumes, this resource is dedicated to supporting healthy ministers and ministry across the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) […] […] This fifth volume focuses on how the church might “grow.” It is well known that since the […]
Critics of the church growth movement have often emphasized the need for quality congregations. We should not focus on numerical growth, but rather, we should concentrate on qualitative growth. Christian Schwarz has done extensive research world-wide and found that healthy, growing churches seem to share eight quality characteristics. These characteristics are: – Empowering leadership – […]
This booklet is one in a series produced by the Evangelism and Church Development Program Area of the National Ministries Division of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). It is designed to introduce the visions, values, convictions and concerns under girding the development of new worshiping congregations in the 21st century.
Paradigm Shift in the Church speaks about nothing less than a reformation. Some critics suggested that this term sounds rather lofty. That may be true. But Christian Schwarz is convinced that we will make no significant progress in our churches without changes as radical as those of the Reformation. In the Introduction to this book […]
Starting a new church is not rocket science – it is much more complicated! A new church is the work of the Holy Spirit, which immediately puts this task way beyond our ability to understand. [This program] is linear, a series of 16 gatherings with assignments and steps a team could complete that take you […]
The Natural Church Development process involves assessing and strengthening eight Quality Characteristics in the local church. NCD International is developing eight Discipleship Resource books, one to address each of these areas. Two of these books are currently available–this one which corresponds to the Quality Characteristic of Loving Relationships and another which which corresponds to the […]